Scott Wu: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, let's talk about the landscape then of just other companies in the space, which is something a lot of people are always thinking about. There's all these different approaches. You guys are going full on AI engineer, there's obviously ID companies. There's also just models being built that are really good at engineering. Everyone's kind of starting to build agents now. You guys are ahead on this in a lot of ways. OpenAI just recently said they're going to build a software engineering agent. Anthropics got something there. Cursor and Windsurf have their only agents and Replit. Thoughts on just where you guys fit in the landscape and then how do you think you win long term. How do you think about that? Yeah, and for what it's worth, I think all of these are incredible teams. I think really smart and really forward-thinking folks who are building a lot of great products out there. And I think there's a lot to do honestly over the next few years with the advent of AGI or whatever you want to call it. I think one of the quotes that I love is in 2017, if you asked if we had AGI, the answer is no. And in 2025, if you ask if we have AGI, the answer is, "Well, you have to define AGI. And it depends on your subject." And I think it does get to the point of, I mean there is a lot of really amazing stuff happening. I think that it's easy to underrate, I would say just how big of a shift it is that we're seeing where I think there are a lot of great products out there, for example, over the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that have made each of these different niches of the life cycle of building a product a little bit easier, for example, right? There's great products out there for instant response, there's great products out there for logging, there's great products out there for billing, there's all of these different tools. And the obvious thing is what we're seeing with AI is all of these spaces are going to be moving multiple times faster and it's going to be like an order of magnitude shift, if anything. And so I think from our perspective, we've obviously had a very specific lens that we've bet on this whole time, and that is autonomous coding agents. And there's a lot of problems to solve there, to be honest, right? There's still a ton to do on the core capabilities, certainly, and we see cases all the time where it's like, wow, why did Devin make that decision? That seems, no human engineer would've ever done that. There's all sorts of spots where, with the product interface, there's obviously a lot to think about. And I think it's by the way, not just a single thing that we're working towards, but something that will change with every edition of capabilities. I kind of think of it as there's 20 generations of agent product, agent coding experiences to come. I think the one that we'll get to over the course of several years is probably something where you don't even look at the code at all, right? And you're actually just looking at your own product and you're just able to look and specify and say, "Hey, this button should be a little bit rounder. Let's do that. And by the way, let's add a new tab here and maybe we should save this information. Let's start up a database table and let's index it on X, Y, and Z columns." And you're just basically working with your products in real time and having your agent build out those things for you. Obviously there's going to be a lot of generations in between here and there, but I think the product experience itself is going to change every single time. And then obviously there, there's all of the practicality of just getting it out there in the world. een here and there, but I think the product experience itself is going to change every single time. And then obviously there, there's all of the practicality of just getting it out there in the world. And so folks obviously need to learn how to use the new technology. There's a lot to do to deploy into all of the messiness of real world software. There's a lot of COBOL out there still. There's a lot of FORTRAN out there still. There's lots of kind of abstractions and details that folks have done. And so I think from our perspective, we have since the beginning have been laser-focused on agentic coding, and that is the one thing that we've really believed in. It's the one thing that we've designed for and that goes all the way to even the revenue model with ACUs and having the usage-based setup. It does into obviously all the product experiences of thinking how, okay, where do you want to talk to Devin? You want to be able to talk to Devin in Slack, you want to be able to spin this up from your issue. You want to be able to all of these things and then of course the capabilities. And so I don't think there's any one easy answer. I think it's obviously a combination of things, but this has been the space that we've lived in and spent all of our time in for the last year and a half, and it's going to be that way for the next five or 10 years too.…

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